"IED Defeat" Group: How Effective?

Share

"IED Defeat" Group: How Effective?

The Pentagon is spending more than $4 billion a year on an agency that's supposed to stop improvised bomb attacks. But it hasn't been easy for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, to prove its worth – to show that it really has helped slow down the explosives that are killing our troops. It's hard to prove a negative, generally. And it's even harder, when soldiers are dying, just about daily.

So JIEDDO has turned to statistics. At the beginning of the Iraq war, an agency official tells DANGER ROOM, the ratio of bombs to coalition casualties was about 1-to-1. Today in Iraq, it's on the order of 6-to-1 – meaning, it now takes more bombs to hurt or kill a servicemember. Unfortunately, the number of attacks has gone up six-fold, too. So the numbers of wounded and killed has stayed more or less constant.

But at least there's some solace in knowing that the insurgents are working harder – and, presumably, spending more – to achieve a similar result. "Improvements in technology and equipment, training, and battlefield tactics have led to this dramatic drop in the casualty rate," a JIEDDO document notes. The Pentagon's "counter-IED efforts have forced the enemy to increase his efforts significantly in order to inflict the same level of damage." Maybe there's a point at which it becomes so hard, the bad guys just give up.

But with so many factors at play (improved armor and better intelligence, to name two), it's difficult to pinpoint exactly how much of an impact JIEDDO has really had. The agency points to the increasing number of "ineffective" IED attacks – bombs that didn't go off – as evidence that the tens of thousands of radio-frequency jammers it bought has kept remotely-triggered bombs in check.

On the other hand, as Sharon noted last month, that 6-to-1 ratio was also true in late October – before many of these jammers were in the field. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the ratio of incidents-per-casualty has actually gone down; it now takes fewer bombs to kill an American than it did in 2004, or late 2005. Which goes to show: nothing about the IED problem is simple. Or easy.